Restart VirtualBox Guest Additions Tray Application Next, you can end the Guest Additions Tray Application task. (Don’t confuse it with the VirtualBox Guest Additions Service.) Right-click the process and select Open file location. Search for VirtualBox Guest Additions Tray Application on the Processes tab. Open Task Manager by right-clicking the taskbar on the virtual machine and then selecting Start Task Manager (CTRL+SHIFT+ESC doesn’t work in VirtualBox VMs). In these situations, you can just restart the VirtualBox Guest Additions Tray Application. If you are in the middle of a test with numerous open applications and windows, rebooting the VM can be very annoying just for making copy and paste work again. Restart the Guest Additions Tray Application In some cases, I also had to reboot the host. Rebooting the VM usually solves the problem. One problem I often encounter is that, after I hibernate the host or the guest, copy/paste no longer works even though it is still enabled in the VM settings. Sometimes, the shared clipboard works just fine for a while, and then suddenly you no longer have access to the host clipboard on the VM.

If you didn’t use the VM for a while and copy/paste causes problems, you should reinstall the Guest Additions.

This is often the case if you updated the VirtualBox but not the Guest Additions on the VM. One possible cause is that you are working with outdated Guest Additions. In practice, I found that copy/paste often isn’t working properly. Shared clipboard in VM settings Update Guest Additions The VM settings can be opened in the VirtualBox Manager or through the key combination HOST + S. You also can enable copy/paste in the VM’s General settings on the Advanced Tab. I usually enable bidirectional shared clipboard when I am working with multiple virtual machines, so I can copy and paste from VM to VM. If you are testing software that you don’t trust, you might want to only enable Host To Guest. After you reboot the virtual machine, you can enable copy/paste on the Devices menu of the VM under Shared Clipboard. To install the Guest Additions launch VBoxWindowsAdditions.exe. The Guest Additions CD image should be mapped to drive D.

Oracle box